The man who invented the emoticon claims the whole thing has gotten out of hand. In 1982, professor Scott Fahlman sent an electronic message to his colleagues at Carenegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh advising them on how best to clarify if they'd written something funny or not. "I propose the following character sequence for joke markers: :-)", the message ran. It continued, unnecessarily: "Read it sideways." In 2012, Fahlman is less chipper about his creation. He fears he has unleashed a monster.

"I think they are ugly," said Fahlman this week of the now ubiquitous smiley. Not all smileys though, just the ones that are coloured yellow. "They ruin the challenge of trying to come up with a clever way to express emotions using standard keyboard characters", he told the Independent. "But perhaps that's just because I invented the other kind."

The other kind are what we might call your traditional emoticons. The yellow kind we might call emoji (after the Japanese graphic characters from which they derive). The former are characteristically used to convey emotions. The latter can perform that function too, but they can also just simply say "ice cream" or "crab moving sideways". Thirty years on, maybe it's time to ask: what have emoticons ever done for us?

Well, first, they can help to clarify the presence of a joke. Irony is often flat on the page, a boss once told me, and it turns out my ironising is flatter than most. An emoticon at the end of a sentence can retrospectively tell people that they should have laughed at that, that there's still time to laugh at that and, if they don't laugh at that, then the problem lies with them. The same applies, by the way, to making people cry.

However, emotional steerage is just one use for emoji. Sometimes you just post a small graphic of a smelly but cute little turd just for the heck of it. For three months I appended every other instant message with cool shades emoji, even though – half the time – I didn't even feel that cool. For me, the primary function of the emoticon (either kind) is not to provide emotional content to my online conversation. What my emoji are really saying is "Look, I know how to fuck around on the internet!". That is an important message to convey. Anyone who watched the first episode of the new season of The Thick of It on Saturday will know that. There is no greater insult in the 21st century than someone suggesting you don't "get" the digital world. Any discomfort you might feel in seeing conversation reduced to 140 characters, or porn becoming the new books, has to be suppressed for fear of humiliation and subsequent cyberbullying.

For those lucky enough never to have known a world without emoji, however, there are different questions. Like what is really lost by communicating entirely in corny cartoon pictures? The haterz, aka those who are proficient in the English language, may say that a lot will be lost. But they would, because they've spent a significant amount of time teaching themselves to talk in polysyllables and don't want to feel they've thrown it away. A young child, however, may decide the most apposite and explicit way of describing their current mood would be to post an emoji of a stinking, but still rather cute turd.

I predict that, in the next 30 years, the use of emoticons will head in a direction that would have caused the 1982 version of Professor Fahlman to soil his drawers. I just don't know whether it would be in a good way or not. Such is the heady, fizzy state of the internet right now that sometimes I think we're on the verge of an entirely new mode of expression and communication. Other days I just think :((